Co-sponsored by Division 14: Comparative Politics of Advanced Industrial Democracies
In-Person Full Paper Panel
Participants:
- (Chair) Pepper D. Culpepper, University of Oxford
- (Discussant) Leah Stokes, UCSB
Session Description:
Climate change is the existential challenge of this century. How countries meet it is a product of politics, which responds to both structural economic roots and politically salient events that focus public attention on the consequences of climate change. In line with the theme of this year’s APSA conference, which invites us to reimagine politics in the face of the pressing crises of today, the papers on this panel constitute a conversation about the varying ways in which political polarization and the economy refract individual attitudes and political party strategies for addressing climate change.
Two of the papers examine the effects of climate change events on politics. The paper by Culpepper, Lee, and Shandler investigates the effects of a scandal surrounding the oil giant Exxon and climate change attitudes. In France, Germany, and Great Britain, they find that exposure to information about the scandal increases both the salience of and the public demand for climate change policies. In the United States, Republicans react differently than Democrats to the scandal, leading to no net effect. The paper by Fasolin and Valentim examines the effect of climate change events – floods – on the decision of people to enter local politics in Brazil. They find that climate change events reduce both the age and education level of mayoral candidates, thereby increasing the involvement of underrepresented actors in politics.
The next two papers on the panel look at how the structure of the labor market influences climate change preferences, both at the individual and aggregate levels. The paper by Heddesheimer, Hilbig, and Voeten explores the way that a far-right party, the German AfD, exploited its opposition to ambitious climate change policies to attract support. Using a difference-in-differences design, they show AfD support increased in counties with more polluting jobs after this platform change. A panel survey further demonstrates that individuals in these occupations also shifted towards the AfD. The paper by Stutzmann uses original data from Germany to explore the effects of employment in the knowledge economy – both in jobs associated with the knowledge economy and the contextual effects of living in local economies dominated by the knowledge economy – on preferences for climate change mitigation.
The final paper on the panel, by Bergquist, Franzblau, and Mildenberger, pans out from individual cases to map the patterns of public polarization on climate change across the globe. The paper draws an original dataset of over 2 million survey responses from 97 surveys conducted between 1998 and 2023, covering more than 100 countries.
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